I was recently in Sabah, on the island of Borneo, were someone told me that the local name (in Malay) for proboscis monkeys is “blanda” (or “orang blanda”) which means…
There is an article in The British North Borneo Herald from 1925 which describes a visit by some British officials to Kamabong [i.e., Kemabong] for a day of sports and…
I’ve been reading colonial-era newspapers from Southeast Asia for quite a while now, and I’ve always skipped over the sections on “turf club news,” that is, news about horse races,…
In reading the 16 September 1904 issue of The British North Borneo Herald, I came across a reference to a band from Manila that passed through Sandakan. This is what…
I need to learn more about how telegraph systems worked. I came across a couple of telegrams that were sent from Zamboanga in the Philippines to Sandakan on Borneo in…
Beaufort is a nice provincial town on the western side Borneo in what is now Sabah, Malaysia. In 1912 it was part of British North Borneo, and in that year…
I was looking at a newspaper called the Borneo Bulletin. It started to be published in 1953 in Brunei, but it was directed at readers in Sawarak and Sabah as…
In 1945, the Australian Imperial Forces were given the task of retaking from the Japanese the former British territories on the island of Borneo. To do this, the Australians had…
I had never heard of the Batu Puteh Caves until I read about them in the July 16, 1903 issue of The British North Borneo Herald. These caves high up…
I was reading Owen Rutter’s 1922 work, British North Borneo: An Account of its History, Resources, and Native Tribes, when I came across an interesting account about a “native” story…